“In 2012 the Medieval and Renaissance Music Conference will be celebrating its 40th birthday with a return to the venue of the first ever MedRen, held at Nottingham in 1972. This year’s conference comprises 43 sessions, plus posters, concerts, workshops and keynotes. Guest Speakers: Prof. Stanley Boorman, Prof. Pedro Memelsdorff, Prof. Richard Freedman …“

The Fall 2012 meeting of the New England Chapter of the American Musicological Society will be held on Saturday, 29 September 2012 at the College of the Holy Cross (Worcester, MA).

The Program Committee welcomes proposals of up to 300 words for papers and roundtable sessions. Presenters must be members of the American Musicological Society. Those who are not currently dues-paying members of the New England Chapter will be asked to kindly remit the modest Chapter dues ($10).

Location: Institute of Musical Research and King's College London, London UK

“Musicians habitually describe music as being shaped, especially when speaking of performance. This conference aims to explore, from as many perspectives as possible, relationships between music and shape. It contributes to the AHRC-funded Research Centre for Musical Performance as Creative Practice and its project, based at King’s College London, on ‘Shaping Music in Performance’ (www.cmpcp.ac.uk/smip.html), and is organised in collaboration with the Institute of Musical Research.“ (IMR website)

“This year’s early music seminar will explore a repertory that is as unusual as it is neglected: music for child soloists in Paris in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. The repertoire fl ourished above all in choirs and ensembles in the various churches and convents in the city (especially the Sainte Chapelle and the monastery of Port Royal) as well as in Jesuit and other religious schools in general. Music was composed to be performed by child soloists in other places too, however: opera houses, theatres, lay musical schools frequented by the children of the lower nobility and the drawing rooms of the courts of Paris and Versailles. …

“The second conference on New Beethoven Research will be held in New Orleans, Louisiana October 31 and November 1, 2012, immediately preceding the annual conference of the American Musicological Society, together with the Society for Music Theory and the Society for Ethnomusicology.”

“The conference brings together a rich set of perspectives on musical improvisation with papers approaching the subject from musicological, cognitive, psycho-social, philosophical, anthropological and pedagogical lenses representing a range of improvisatory genres. In addition to papers, there will be practical workshops and performances; we are also delighted to welcome a number of eminent scholars to the conference - two invited speakers and three panel members:

“The University of Alabama School of Music, together with the University of Illinois, Wake Forest University, the American Beethoven Society, the Ira F. Brilliant Center for Beethoven Studies, and San José State University (Prof. Joanna Biermann UA, Prof. William Kinderman UIUC, Prof. David Levy WFU, Prof. William Meredith SJSU) are sponsoring a second fall conference on New Beethoven Research, to be held in New Orleans on October 31 and November 1, 2012.

New Perspectives on the Keyboard Works of Antonio Soler

“The 11th International Symposium on Spanish Keyboard Music “Diego Fernández” will be held at the Parador of Mojácar, Almería, Andalusia , on the 11 to 12 October 2012, as part of FIMTE 2012 (11-14 October): the 13th International Festival of Spanish Keyboard Music. The festival will feature both mainstream and fringe concerts and a workshop on performance-related issues with Luisa Morales.

“PURPOSE OF THE SOCIETY

To cultivate, foster, sponsor, and develop appreciation of the art, history, literature and uses of historical harps.

To promote appreciation of and to raise the level of proficiency in the performance and use of historical harps.

To keep historical harp makers and performers, along with other friends of the historical harp, informed about literature and activities pertaining to historical harps, and to provide occasions for them to meet.

To promote the use of historical harps as professional instruments, and to encourage their use among amateurs.

To encourage the reconstruction of historical harps.

To collect and disseminate information regarding the construction of and performance upon historical harps.”

The 2012 Lute Society of America Summer Seminar and Lute Festival, 24 through 29 June, will again take place at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. The faculty will include some old familiar faces, Robert Barto, Doug Freundlich, Ellen Hargis, Christopher Morrongiello (along with other members of The Bacheler Consort), Nigel North, Pat O’Brien, Paul O’Dette, and Crawford Young, and we are excited to announce that Eduardo Egüez and Sylvain Bergeron will be joining the roster this time. The Pat O’Brien Scholar will be Grant Herreid, perhaps best known for his performances with Piffaro, and the Lute Doctor will be Andrew Rutherford.

Faculty of Music, University of Oxford

Improvisation is arguably the most widely distributed form of musical practice - and yet remains the least studied or understood. Indeed, even the boundaries of what is or is not regarded as improvisation remain unclear. This conference will address the many faces of improvisation from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives - historical, psychological, ethnomusicological, analytical, technological, sociological, organological, and pedagogical. Over the course of four days, the conference will include papers, practical sessions, and poster presentations.

The conference is affiliated to the AHRC-funded Centre for Musical Performance as Creative Practice (CMPCP) and enjoys the support of SEMPRE, IMR, BFE, and SMA.

The period from 1750 to 1850 witnessed unprecedented growth in the musical marketplace. This was an age in which the proliferation of print technologies, the widening distribution of instruments for domestic use, and the gradual establishment of public music institutions across England and the Continent altered the patterns of circulation for music in its printed and sounding form.

Consuming Music, Commodifying Sound, 1750-1850

Yale University NH
October 5-6, 2012

Call for Papers The period from 1750 to 1850 witnessed unprecedented growth in the musical marketplace. This was an age in which the proliferation of print technologies, the widening distribution of instruments for domestic use, and the gradual establishment of public music institutions across England and the Continent altered the patterns of circulation for music in its printed and sounding form.

The Rocky Mountain Chapter of the American Musicological Society will hold its annual meeting on 30-31 Mar, 2012, at the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley, Colorado. The meeting will be held jointly with the Rocky Mountain Chapter of the Society for Music Theory.

Organized by Christian Thorau (Universität Potsdam), Hansjakob Ziemer (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science)

Since the mid-1990s and the publication of "Listening in Paris: A Cultural History" (1995), the path-breaking book by James Johnson, the history of music listening has been the focus of renewed interest in the fields of musicology, history and cultural studies. There have been a number of recent studies on music listening – as one among many forms of listening in modernity – that examine the act of listening in the concert within the broader context of music, social, cultural, and intellectual history.

(featuring a DVD of a “reconstruction” of the Chaconne in Idomeneo, made by Claudia Jeschke and Sibylle Dahms with dancer Rainer Krenstetter.)

“Irene Brandenburg is a musicologist and dance historian of the history of European musical theatre, with a focus on eighteenth-century Italian opera and ballet. She studied musicology and Romance studies at Salzburg University, receiving a doctor’s degree with distinction in 1996.

Half-day symposium as part of the 15th International Congress of the Gesellschaft für Musikforschung, "Music | Musics: Structures and Processes", 4-8 September 2012, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Germany

Call for Papers

This half-day symposium is dedicated to a topic that to this day remains under-researched within historical musicology: the forms and effects of colonial music practice during the age of Enlightenment. The heterogeneous characteristics of colonial politics exercised by the Portuguese, Spanish, British, Dutch, Danish, and French allow researchers to draw conclusions regarding many aspects of their musical practices, including where they lie on the spectrum between segregation and acculturation and, in missionary contexts, accommodation of local musical traditions, syncretism, and the rites controversy. Furthermore, …

“The 2012 Annual Meeting of the Pacific Northwest chapter will take place from 27 to 29 April 2012 at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, AB. The program committee, chaired by Professor Mary Ingraham, invites submissions of abstracts for 20-minute papers of up to 500 words, preferably as a Word, Rich Text, or PDF attachment.”

Early Modern Research Centre, University of Reading, UK
Early Modern Studies Conference July 12th-14th 2012

“A series of panels within Reading University’s Early Modern Studies Conference (2012) will be devoted to the exploration of writing by early modern women. We would welcome proposals for panels or individual papers addressing any aspect of early modern women’s writing, but we are particularly keen to receive proposals addressing the critical assumptions underlying current scholarly practice.

An International and Interdisciplinary Conference at Victoria College in the University of Toronto.

“The early modern period witnessed a dramatic increase in the migration, expulsion and exile of social groups and individuals around the globe. The physical movements of religious refugees triggered widespread, ongoing migrations that shaped both the contours of European colonialist expansion and the construction of regional, national and religious identities. Human movements (both real and imagined) also animated material culture; the presence of bodies, buildings, texts, songs and relics shaped and reshaped the host societies into which immigrants entered.

“The Early Dance Circle [EDC] was formed in 1984 as an umbrella organisation to promote the enjoyment, performance and study of Early Dance in the UK … its membership comprises of individuals and groups throughout the UK and beyond.

The Circle’s recognised objects are to foster knowledge, understanding and appreciation of dance and its context in European society up to and including the twentieth century - and of its music and of other subjects in so far as they affect or are affected by Early Dance.”

“The 14th Oxford Dance Symposium will address a wide range of issues on dancing in the European theatre in the long 18th century. … The first Dance Symposium at New College took place on 21 April 1999 with Dance on the English Stage, and has become a yearly event. Each symposium is designed to explore different aspects of dance, with particular reference to its musical, theatrical, literary and social context during the long eighteenth-century.”

CFP “Between Indifference and Engagement: Music and Politics”

The Stony Brook Music Department announces its Second Annual Graduate Music Symposium, to be held February 17-18, 2012. The symposium will feature a keynote address by James Currie (SUNY-Buffalo), as well as a performance of George Bizet’s Carmen as adapted by Peter Brook.